“The Mauritanian” Perfectly Captures the Horrors of Guantánamo and the US Torture Program

The goody bag for the online screening of “The Mauritanian” that I was invited to attend last Friday, February 5, 2021.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last Friday I was privileged to be invited to an online pre-release screening of “The Mauritanian,” the new feature film about former Guantánamo prisoner and torture victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi (aka Salahi), based on his best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

French actor Tahar Rahim shines as Mohamedou, capturing his nimble mind, and also capturing something of his gentle charisma, admirably supported by his attorneys Nancy Hollander (played by Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (actually a composite of two attorneys, played by Shailene Woodley), and with Benedict Cumberbatch appearing as Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, Mohamedou’s military prosecutor, who resigned after discovering his torture, and how the only evidence against him consisted of statements that he made as a result of his torture.

The screenplay was written by Michael Bronner (as M. B. Traven), working with the writing duo of Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, and the director was Kevin Macdonald, and all involved are to be commended for creating a film that does justice to Mohamedou’s story — and I’m grateful to Nancy Hollander for having specifically included a photo of herself holding up a “Close Guantánamo” poster in the end credits, which I took of her in April 2016 at a Parliamentary meeting for Mohamedou in London.

The trailer is below, via YouTube:

Ever since Guantánamo Diary was published, in January 2015, it was obvious that it was a prime candidate for a feature film that would expose the horror of Guantánamo and the US’s post-9/11 torture program. In common with other Guantánamo prisoners who had written memoirs, Mohamedou was intelligent and articulate, but he also had a sharp sense of humor, and, most remarkably, an extraordinary lack of bitterness about how he had been treated.

His story also touched on key elements of the “war on terror”: how the US authorities kidnapped and tortured individuals based merely on suspicion, and often as a result of dubious confessions made by other individuals detained and subjected to torture; and how, at Guantánamo, the law was largely, if not entirely out of reach, and the authorities’ default position was to hold people indefinitely without charge or trial.

In Mohamedou’s case, he came under suspicion because, as a young man, in the early ’90s, he had traveled to Afghanistan and had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, and also because his cousin Mafouz Ould al-Walid (aka Abu Hafs al-Mauritani) had been a spiritual advisor to al-Qaeda, and had called him from a satellite phone traced to Osama bin Laden (what no one on the US side ever mentioned was that Abu Hafs had opposed the 9/11 attacks, and had left al-Qaeda in protest). In addition, while living in Germany, Mohamedou had, on one occasion, met some of the 9/11 hijackers, and later, while living in Canada, had attended a mosque that was also attended by Ahmed Ressam, who was later arrested and imprisoned for having allegedly been involved in a ‘Millennium Plot’ to  bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

Suspicion, however, is not the same as proof, although disgracefully, in the “war on terror,” Mohamedou’s refusal to confess to his invented crimes led the authorities to subject him to a horrendous program of torture, specifically approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, from May to August 2003, when he was subjected to prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, the use of extreme heat and cold, physical violence and sexual humiliation.

Towards the end of this period, the authorities told hm that his mother was being brought to Guantánamo, where she would be raped, and he was also blindfolded, taken out to sea in a boat, and subjected to a mock execution. Eventually, broken by the torture, Mohamedou signed a false confession, became an informant, and was rewarded by being held with another informant in a facility separate from the rest of the prison’s population, where they were allowed to maintain a small garden, and where, ironically, Mohamedou was allowed to write the account of his experiences that eventually — after years of wrangling with the authorities — became Guantánamo Diary.

And yet, as was explained to Slahi’s editor Larry Siems in an interview in 2013 by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commission trial system (who also resigned in protest at the use of torture), the supposed case against Slahi was never backed up by anything resembling evidence. “He reminded me of Forrest Gump,” Col. Davis explained, “in the sense that there were a lot of noteworthy events in the history of al-Qaida and terrorism, and there was Slahi, lurking somewhere in the background. He was in Germany, Canada, different places that look suspicious, and that caused them to believe that he was a big fish, but then when they really invested the effort to look into it, that’s not where they came out.”

In March 2010, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., Judge James Robertson was also unconvinced by the government’s claims, granting Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition, and stating in his opinion, “Associations alone are not enough … to make detention lawful.”

As I explained at the time:

Although he accepted, as Salahi himself admitted, that “he traveled to Afghanistan in early 1990 to fight jihad against communists and that there he swore bayat to al-Qaeda,” he also, essentially, accepted Salahi’s assertion that “his association with al-Qaeda ended after 1992, and that, even though he remained in contact thereafter with people he knew to be al-Qaeda members, he did nothing for al-Qaeda after that time.” This was in marked contrast to the government’s claim that he “was so connected to al-Qaeda for a decade beginning in 1990 that he must have been ‘part of’ al-Qaeda at the time of his capture.”

As I also explained, the ruling contained important concessions by the government:

The first is that, although Salahi was originally seized in connection with Ahmed Ressam’s thwarted “Millennium Plot,” the government now “does not allege that Salahi participated in the Millennium Plot.” The second — even more extraordinarily, given how Salahi has been sold to the public over the years — is that the government now “acknowledg[es] that Salahi probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.”

Despite Mohamedou’s court victory, however, the Obama administration appealed, and his successful habeas petition was vacated in November 2010, and sent back to the lower court to reconsider — although that never happened. 

Instead, he had to wait until June 2016 to be given a chance to persuade a panel of military and intelligence officials — in a parole-type process, the Periodic Review Boards, established by President Obama — that he no longer posed a threat to the US, and that it was safe to release him. In October 2016, almost 14 years after he was first abducted, after voluntarily handing himself in to the Mauritanian authorities, Mohamedou was released to Mauritania, a free man — although he has since struggled to secure a passport, and finds that foreign travel remains a problem.

“The Mauritanian” has a limited theatrical release tomorrow in the US, and will then be released online. I do hope you will be able to watch it, because — to reiterate — it shines a light on the US’s shameful post-9/11 flight from justice, and, crucially, the ways in which kidnapping and torture were based on nothing more than suspicion or hearsay, or on statements made by other tortured individuals (which were, of course, inherently unreliable), and how, at Guantánamo in particular, this evidence-free worldview continues to involve the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of the majority of the 40 men still held. I can only hope that the release of “The Mauritanian” will contribute to the prison’s closure.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.